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92 coming down from Mayburn with the women, he overtook the coach in which were two old women in their way to Cooktown.

We all camped at Shepherd's Creek, Graham's place (Graham the teamster). Here he kept a large back-roofed slab building also called a hotel (he bought poor MacDowell out just before that worthy dropped down dead), into which we were all glad to turn. Soon after our arrival the rain came down in torrents. The warden was sandwiched in a little partitioned space between the two old women, who slept in one bed together, and Graham's old woman and daughter-in-law, who slept in another just the other side of him. One of the old women was the German wife of the German Accommodation House keeper (another hotel) at Maytown.

The poor warden, dead tired, couldn't get a wink of sleep, for he lay between, and was the recipient of the whispered confidences of the four women. The two old Maytown women discussed and pulled to pieces in the usual feminine way a young woman who recently arrived at Maytown, and created a stir in that almost God-forgotten place. They left the poor girl without a shred to her back or to her reputation, the conversation ending with a parting shot from the German frau, who clinched all matters relating to the new arrival with "Vaal, she stoppit met me at my hause, ven she coom up mit der coach, and I vas zee all vat she haf got, und she may haf dree vite dressis, but she haf no chemeeses, ain't it."

Donald lifted his arm above his head, bringing his fist down with a bang on the table that made everything jump.

"Chemeeses! My God, Chemeeses!" cried Donald and let a roar out of him that startled the dog and set all the parrots, in a huge home-made cage, screeching.

Donald's wife was on a jaunt, at the time, in Cooktown, at the races on her way home from Herberton,